On the Plutarchian system of comparison, John Law and
William Paterson should pair off together—the one, as having ruined France
with the Mississippi scheme, the other as having ruined Scotland with the
Darien scheme. They had other parallel conditions in life, in that they
were competitors in laying schemes before their own countrymen. Law had
proposed certain projects to the Parliament of Scotland, which, being in a
cautious humour, they declined to adopt, and he then carried his genius
abroad. Paterson’s schemes were all directed to the aggrandisement of his
own country, and there-fore he does not appear, at first sight, within the
category of those Scotsmen whose genius and achievements have been
exhibited among foreigners. But Paterson during a large part of his life
was busy abroad. His practical information on foreign countries guided the
Darien Company and the Scottish Parliament in all their operations. The
way in which he obtained this information was connected with two rather
inconsistent - looking accusations touching the
occupations of his earlier days. The one was that he had obtained it as a
buccaneer or pirate in the Spanish Main; the other, that he picked it up
while acting as a canting missionary in communication with the Puritans of
New England. When we think of men and their actions, we should always
endeavour to see them by the light of their own times. The two professions
were not so utterly inconsistent in the seventeenth as they are in the
nineteenth century. Paterson’s correspondence shows him to have been
slightly pious. But a good deal of piety need not have been inconsistent
with the transaction of business after the usual manner on the Spanish
Main. Few commanders of vessels who found themselves strong enough to get
off with it could then resist the temptation to mix up a little
buccaneering with legitimate commerce. Sea rights and sea ethics were by
no means so distinctly defined as they now are. The rule then was that
good old rule which Wordsworth admired so much for its patriarchal
simplicity—

"That he should take who has the power,
And he should keep who can."

Once in blue water, the Tarpaulin, as the rough-handed
skipper of that day was called, considered that he was free of land-laws
and diplomatic obligations—a sort of separate self-acting power; and as
there was generally some war or other going on, he was free to take either
side and plunder the enemy, and to change sides as opportunity suggested.
Paterson’s own colony was considered a nest of buccaneers by the
Spaniards, and indeed their conduct was not calculated to rebut the
charge. They seized all the Spanish vessels they could lay hand on, as
those of enemies; but having on one occasion mistaken an English vessel
for a Spanish and seized it, they could not be prevailed on to rectify the
mistake by a restoration.

People open their eyes at the great buccaneer, Henry
Morgan, having been knighted; but there was nothing anomalous had he even
also, as the biographer of Paterson says he was, been made governor of
Jamaica. He was so great a leader of ruffians as to be almost an
independent sovereign, like the Dey of Algiers. He would have boasted of
his feats at court. Perhaps a day may come when it will be considered
flagitious to appoint an aristocratic blackleg to a post of trust; and
Thackeray’s promotion of Rawdon Crawley to the government of a colony may
be cited as a type of the habits our generation, as Defoe’s Colonel Jack
exemplifies the time—not much more than a century old—when young men were
kidnapped on the streets of Newcastle or Aberdeen, and sold as slaves to
very respectable houses concerned in the plantation trade.

Paterson’s zealous biographer, Mr Saxe Bannister,
repudiates the charge against him, saying that it rests on no better
authority than Burnet’s general observation, "There was one Paterson, a
man of no education, but of great notions, which it was generally said he
had learned from the buccaneers, with whom he had consorted for some
time." And certainly, as nothing more specific can be discovered about his
early pursuits, we have no right to hold that they must have been tinged
with piracy.

His later transactions with foreign countries are
sufficiently ostensible. When his scheme was at its climax, he directed
some very important negotiations on the Continent, where he in some
measure tried his strength against the power of William III. The cause of
the calamities of Scotland at that time was the determination of the Dutch
King to sacrifice everything to his European system. To this end, when he
had to consider whether he should be just to Scotland, or propitiate the
great trading interests of England, he chose the latter alternative. The
Darien Scheme, as most people are aware, was a plan to enable Scotland to
have a foreign trade and colonies of her own, since the Navigation Act
made her a foreign country to England, not entitled to participate in the
English shipping privileges and colonial trade. The projectors of the
Darien Scheme naturally enough courted English capital, and estab

lished
an office in London. This was denounced as a breach of the privileges of
the East India Company, as well as in various other shapes offensive, and
the eminent men who represented the Company in London were hunted out of
England as criminals.

Paterson
conceived that, as Scotland was deemed a foreign country, incapable of
participating in the trading privileges of England, she was, as a
converse, not only entitled, but invited to treat with her old friends on
the Continent, without asking leave of her imperious yoke-fellow. It was
arranged that the Company should fill up the shares which the English
merchants had subscribed, but were obliged to abandon, in that old burghal
community which had been long associated with Scotland—the Hanse Towns.
But that foreigners should enter in the field of enterprise from which
their own jealous laws excluded themselves, was intolerable to the English
capitalists, and they had interest enough to get instructions issued to
the representatives of England in foreign courts—Scotland could not afford
to have representatives—that the Company disposing of its shares was not
countenanced by the king, and any communities giving encouragement to it
would encounter his displeasure. The Burgomasters of Hamburg indignantly
repudiated the King of England’s right to menace them, and said they
traded as they pleased; but the Hamburgers did not take stock.

The flow of capital from Northern
Europe was in fact effectually checked by the intervention of William.
Paterson showed on the occasion his versatile resources, and looked at
once to the other side of the Continent. He proposed terms to the Armenian
merchants, the great masters of Eastern trade, whose chain of connections
passed from Hindostan to Lapland. These men, so remarkable for their
honesty, sagacity, and substantiality, would fain have aided the Scots,
had they not, through their subtle channels of intelligence, known that
the Darien Company was not countenanced by the king who reigned over
Scotland. Thus was frustrated a plan by which Paterson and his friends
projected an overland traffic to India, and the establishment in the
Eastern Peninsula of factories which should rival those of the East India
Company of England.

It is matter for much regret that
both the beginning and the conclusion, with many portions of Paterson’s
life, are so dark to the world. This is not for want of any deficiency in
biographical zeal, though it came too late to be effectual. Still there is
much for the world to be grateful for in the fruit of the long labours of
Mr Saxe Bannister. If he has not done much to clear up the events of
Paterson’s life, he has given the clearest possible rendering of his
opinions and projects, by discovering and printing all his works. It is a
sufficient hint that the contents of these volumes are important, to say
that they give forth the earliest practical exposition of the doctrines of
free trade, and that they enlarge on the illimitable character of commerce
when protected from interference. The editor, among the many vast schemes
of his master, has found one of a smaller character, but curious and
interesting—a design to found a public library, to consist solely of books
bearing on trade. He collected the nucleus of it himself; and if he could
read the books he thus bought, which are enumerated in a catalogue made by
him, he must have been free, or must have freed himself; from Burnet’s
charge of being uneducated.

If it be open, by ingenious special
theories, to prove that the Mississippi scheme was not in the end
disastrous, it is quite clear that Paterson’s was in the end beneficent.
In the first place, Scotland compelled restitution by England of the loss
caused to the shareholders of the Darien Company. The amount paid up in
calls was refunded to each up to the last penny, from the fund called "The
Equivalent." Having tasted the benefits of a free trade with England
during Cromwell’s time, the country was determined to have it again, or
set up an opposition interest to England by an alliance with France or
some other great foreign power. The breaking-down of the dynasty of the
daughters of King James, by the death of all Anne’s children, gave
Scotland her opportunity. Whatever way England settled the succession,
Scotland would settle it otherwise, unless she were made a participator in
the English privileges of trade. An Act was passed to arm the country in
case England should attempt to force through the Scots Parliament a
concurrence in the Hanover succession. As one of the ships of the Darien
Company had been seized for a breach of the privileges of the English
African Company, an English vessel was seized in the Forth by way of
reprisal. On suspicion of having committed piracy on a Scots ship, the
English captain and crew were tried and condemned to death. The proof
against them was very defective in any eyes not obscured by national
wrath, and the Crown wished to spare the men’s lives, but dared not do it
in the face of the temper shown by the country. The men were hanged, to
express the country’s sense of the grasping selfishness of the English
merchants. It was now clear that there was nothing for it but to concede
to Scotland the full privilege of participation in English trade, and so
came the Treaty of Union.

By a natural transition from that
portion of the connection of Scotland with other countries which
associates itself with the career of Paterson, we might get among the
Hanse Towns, and other trading districts of the north of Europe, where
Scots merchants appear to have swarmed. They had established special
privileges in the Low Countries, which they kept a kind of ambassador or
consul to protect. He was "the Lord Conservator of Scots privileges at
Campvere," and the office, having become a sinecure, was given to John
Home by way of compensation and consolation when he was deprived of his
office as a parish minister for writing ‘Douglas.’ There were a number of
merchants in Sweden, who, with the remnant of the Scots soldiers of
Gustavus Adolphus, merged into what were called the thirty-six noble Scots
houses there. I have in my hand a book by a member of one of them named
Andrew Murray; it is a Treatise on the History and Whereabouts of those
Kenites who were prophesied against by Balsam, and told that, ‘though
strong was their dwelling-place, and they put their nest in a rock, yet
they should be wasted until Ashur should carry them away captive.’ The
author dedicates his book to three noble merchants of Prussia—two of them
his relations and Murrays - John in Memel and Thomas in Dantzic, where
there was a considerable fraternity of Scots merchants. Among the
Slavonians who do not take to commerce, and have their merchandise done by
other races, the Scots seem to have supplied all grades, from the merchant
princes to the pedlars, so called from walking about with their available
stock in trade. The vacuum they left when the Union opened up the home
market to Scots enterprise, seems to have been filled by Jews. Sir John
Skene, who put into his Law Dictionary a quantity of the little
specialties of personal knowledge which are so valuable when found in old
books, but so little likely to be found in law dictionaries, says of
pedlars, "Ane pedder is called ane merchand or cremar, quha bears ane pack
or crame upon his back, quaha are called bearars of the puddill be the
Scottesmen in the realme of Polonia, quhairof I saw ane great multitude in
the town of Cracovia, anno Dom. 1569."

I have little doubt that a deal of
matter both valuable and curious might be found by an investigation into
the conditions which created the class of trading Scots. The present
object is, however, rather to tell what has fallen in the writer’s way
than to search out new matter; and as I do not happen to possess any
notices of them sufficiently picturesque for the present purpose, I again
take advantage of the licence to bring forth any occurrences in the career
of Scotsmen in the diplomatic service, when these happen to go beyond the
ordinary beaten circle of diplomatic functions.

The scene opens in a state to which
the world has lately been looking with unusual interest—Denmark—in the
remote palace of Friedrichsborg, about the year 1771. The notorious
Struensee, who, with a few long strides, passed from the function of a
German village-doctor to that of prime minister, or more properly,
dictator of Denmark, has just reached the climax of his meteoric career.
He was a prodigious reformer; but it is useless to discuss the merit of
his projects. If there was any nation in Europe at that time where the
Pombals, Josephs, or Potemkins could take great social systems to pieces
and reconstruct them scientifically, without mischief or danger, Denmark
was not that nation. It is quite different now; but at that time—before
the first French Revolution, remember—in no European country was there a
harder system of immovable uniformity and routine, protected by a powerful
aristocratic order whose existence depended on its being executed to the
minutest tittle. The old Norse freedom and heartiness were entirely gone,
and everything was frozen into an icy permanence by the frigid influence
which the Russian autocracy and bureaucracy were then exercising over the
northern nations. But however judicious or acceptable in themselves
Struensee’s reforms might have been, they came from a poisoned fountain.
He was one of that most odious of all classes of statesmen, a royal
favourite; and of the two kinds of royal favouritism his was by repute the
more odious—the favouritism of a woman.

The young Queen of Denmark, Caroline
Matilda, the sister of George IlI., was reared in a Court where a princess
was certainly not likely to imbibe profligacy; and it is difficult to
conceive any one brought up under the same auspices as her rigid brother,
becoming even amenable to a charge of levity. Her possession of remarkable
beauty and great powers of fascination is scarcely less easily
reconcilable with that generation of the royal family. That she had these
powers of fascination seems, however, to be beyond a doubt. It can be as
little doubted that she was wayward and indiscreet; and indeed her own
family did little to vindicate her fame from graver charges. If it were
any vindication of her conduct, it is certain that her husband Christian
was as contemptible and odious a being as ever lived in a sty of
profligacy—a sort of vulgarised Darnley, in a single-breasted coat and
powdered wig.

Struensee .was originally his own
favourite, and was dragged by him, with that indecorous vehemence with
which weak men tug at their favourites, into the inmost recesses of the
palace. He was highly educated, handsome, clever, and agreeable. The Queen
certainly liked him; and she had some good substantial reasons for
awarding him a decorous preference. He took in hand the charge of the
young Crown Prince’s health, as a physician, and. superintended the
training both of his body and mind. A mother might have sympathy for all
reasonable dispensations of kindness to such a person, and Struensee had
claims perhaps of a still more touching kind, in being the means of
reconciling the royal couple to each other—of exacting promises of
reformation from the King, and pardon of his past profligacy from the poor
Queen.

It is difficult to say which of the
three—the King, the Queen, or their favourite—acted the maddest part in
the political saturnalia which followed. Struensee’s certainly was the
guiding hand, so far as there was guidance. Step by step he rose in
political power, each step being attended by an excess of folly and
presumption. At length, when he had the fate of Denmark in his hands, he
scattered to the winds at one blast the old Council of State, in which the
representatives of the chief families of Denmark held absolute
oligarchical rule. He transferred the power of government to a ministerial
board subservient to his own bidding.

It was scarcely consistent with
human nature that the discharged statesmen should bear this act with
Christian meekness. At the same time, the favourite could not so easily
make good harvests, and abolish idle habits among the people, as he could
dismiss the Council. The times happened to be hard, and the people made
common cause with the nobles, charging the favourite with their
calamities. Drunk with power, he did many frantic and wicked things; but
of all his follies and vices, the least defensible part of his conduct was
his treatment of the Queen. With such a husband as she had, and with all
the Court against her, she unfortunately was too solely dependent on the
favourite. He exulted in his strength, and proclaimed, as it were, his
triumph in conduct which would have been despicable if the poor woman had
been erring, and was fiendish if she were innocent.

At length a blow was struck. The
Queen was arrested, so were Struensee and his friend Brand. The triumphant
party were madder with success than even the fallen favourite had ever
been. They fiercely demanded blood. Struensee was at once hurled with
Oriental precipitancy from the throne to the scaffold, and was executed
with every concomitant of ignominy and honor.

There is little doubt that the Queen
would have been a victim had not a hand been stretched out to save her.
The whole wild history was watched by the calm observant eye of a young
Scot—Colonel Robert Keith, who, though a novice in diplomacy, was deemed
suitable to be trusted with so quiet a post as the Danish mission. But few
veteran ambassadors have ever been more sorely tried. Was he to see the
sister of his Sovereign put to death? and if not, where were the means by
which he could avert her fate? No doubt, national wars had often been
caused by acts far more trifling. Philip V. of Spain had declared that
rivers of blood would not wash out an incidental slight thrown on his
family, and he would not have thought thousands of lives unduly wasted in
such a cause. But it was not to be concluded that Britain would plunge
into a European war for the fate of one person, though that person were a
Princess. These were the diplomatic difficulties which would surround such
a question at the conference-table. The young Ambassador solved them all
by an act of wise heroism. He was free at all events to sacrifice his own
personal safety in the cause. He took it on himself to denounce any act of
violence to the Queen as an act of war with England, and to strike his
flag as one who was no longer an ambassador protected by the law of
nations, but a prisoner in the hands of the enemies of his country.

A little examination will show that
this step was as wise as it was disinterested. If it proved successful,
and the revolutionists spared the Queen, it would be for the consideration
of the British Government whether or not they should punish the successful
blusterer for an excess of his constitutional powers as a British
ambassador. If he were unsuccessful—if the Danish Cabinet defied the
representative of Britain, and sacrificed the Queen to their vengeance—it
was still in the power of the British Government to repudiate the act of
the Ambassador, and be at peace with Denmark.

The question fortunately did not
arise in its more formidable shape. No violence beyond enforced seclusion
was offered to the Queen. An uncertainty, which may be called
unsatisfactory rather than mysterious, hangs over the subsequent
intercourse of the two governments about her destination. The history of
the time does not speak of war with Denmark as one of the perils of
Britain, but the diplomacy refers to a formidable naval force prepared to
rescue the Queen from the hands of her enemies.

In the ‘Annual Register’ for the
year, there is a pretty full history of the revolution, followed by an
account of the conclusion of the contest between Denmark and the Dey of
Algiers. About the position of the Queen of Denmark, the writer of the
chronicle for the year speaks as one who desired information, but had it
not to give. Nothing is said of an armed force being fitted out, yet the
following passage of a letter from Lord Suffolk, the Foreign Secretary,
has an air as if Britain had made preparation for war. "The national
object," he says, "of procuring the liberty of a daughter of England,
confined in Denmark after her connection with Denmark was dissolved, is
now obtained. For this alone an armament was prepared, and therefore, as
soon as the acquiescence of the Court of Copenhagen was known, the
preparations were suspended, that the mercantile and marine interests of
this kingdom might be affected no longer than was necessary by the
expectation of a war. Instead of a hostile armament, two frigates and a
sloop are now ordered to Elsinore. One of them is already in the Downs,
the others will repair thither immediately, and as soon as the wind
permits they will proceed to their destination."

The small force was sent as a sort
of guard of honour to accompany the Queen to her place of retreat at Zell,
known from its tragic association with another princess connected with the
house of Hanover. The allusion to the larger force which might have been
fitted out, but was not, may be suspected to have been a small diplomatic
expedient for imparting a wholesome alarm to the ruling powers in Denmark.

The shape in which the
acknowledgments of his Court seem to have been conveyed to the spirited
young Ambassador has the same unsatisfactory mystery or uncertainty which
characterises the whole conduct of the British Court in this matter. The
anxiously awaited despatch, in which his conduct was to be approved or
condemned, contained, if we may believe the laborious editor of his
papers, neither approval nor condemnation; but "the parcel flew open, and
the Order of the Bath fell at his feet! The insignia had been enclosed by
the King’s own hands, with a despatch commanding him to invest himself
forthwith, and appear at the Danish Court."

It had got wind among the gossips of
the day that there was something peculiar in the acknowledgment of Keith’s
services, for Horace Walpole is found writing: "Mr Keith’s spurt in behalf
of the Queen has been rewarded. The red ribbon has been sent him, though
there was no vacancy, with orders to put it on directly himself, as there
is no sovereign in Denmark to invest him with it." A letter from Lord
Suffolk to the father of the new-made knight enlarges on the eminence of
the distinction conferred. "The dispensation with ceremonies is carried
further than usual;" the dependence of negotiations is chosen as the time
for conferring the decoration, because his Majesty wishes it to be the
reward of merit, independently of success; it is the King’s own personal
act; and "Sir R. Keith is not to inquire into the expenses of the present
his Majesty has made." So the Secretary parades the reward, carefully
avoiding any reference to the nature of the service for which it is
conferred. I admit that something like an idle curiosity has led me into
these piebald criticisms on the conduct of the British Government with
reference to the history of Queen Matilda. When the subject is old enough,
and the state papers bearing on it are freely published, it will doubtless
afford matter for a curious secondary chapter in British history.

The young knight, whose mission it
appeared to be to revive the institutions of ancient chivalry, by winning
his spurs in the defence of injured and imperilled beauty, had very little
romance in his character, but a great fund of Scottish shrewdness,
tempered by honourable uprightness, and put to good service by various
qualifications, in which we may fairly include the pen of a ready writer.
His father, Robert Keith of Craig, in Kincardineshire, the country of The
Keiths, was also a diplomatist. He rose from the office of Lord Stair’s
military secretary to be Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and
afterwards Ambassador at Vienna and at St Petersburg. Both the father and
the son witnessed, and were more or less concerned in, several of the
historical events marking the progress of the northern courts—events
which, though they seem to have been buried under the more convulsive
revolutions of later times, are yet eminently deserving of careful study,
as the organic elements out of which several of the states of Europe have
grown, and from which they take their political character and destiny.

The elder Keith thus describes a
great revolution in Russia. On Friday, the 13th day of July 1762, he had
an appointment to meet the Emperor. It was thus interrupted: "About nine
o’clock one of my servants came running into my bed-chamber, with a
frighted countenance, and told me that there was a great uproar at the
other end of the town; that the guards, having mutinied, had assembled,
and talked of no less than dethroning the Emperor. He could tell me no
other circumstances, nor could give me any answer to the only question I
asked— namely, if the Empress was in town: but about a quarter of an hour
after, one of the gentlemen of our factory came in, and informed me that
the Empress was in town; that she had been declared by the guards and the
other troops of the garrison their Empress and Sovereign; and that she was
then actually at the Casansky church to hear mass and the ‘Te Deum’ sung
on the occasion."

The colleges of the empire, and all
the great people, were pressing to take the oaths, like people crowding to
a fashionable singer or a popular preacher. The whole affair occupied two
hours, during which the quarter of the town where the English resided "was
as quiet as if nothing extraordinary had happened; the only novelty to be
seen was some pickets placed at the bridges and corners of the streets,
and some of the home-guards patrolling, in order to preserve the public
tranquillity." To make clean work of it, in the evening the Empress was
seen marching forth, "at the head of ten or twelve thousand men, with a
great train of artillery, on the road to Peterhoff, in order to attack the
Emperor, whether at Peterhoff or Oranienbaum; and the next day, in the
afternoon, we received the accounts of His Imperial Majesty having,
without striking a stroke, surrendered his person and resigned his crown."
Such was the installation of the Semiramis of the North, the great
Catherine—an event pregnant with great results both to Europe and Asia.

A considerable number of letters by
the elder Keith, and a far greater number of his son’s, are to be found in
the two octavo volumes just referred to. To people who are fond of reading
old family papers in fluent print, without floundering through the blots,
or stumbling over the crabbed cacography of the original manuscript, the
volumes will have an interest; and the historian who gropes diligently
through them will find a few facts. Some of the best letters in the
collection were addressed to "Sister Anne," Mrs Murray Keith, a lady
occupying a niche in literature as the Mrs Bethune Balliol of Scott, who
says of her, in a letter printed, with pardonable pride, by the editing
relation: "I never knew any one whose sunset was so enviably serene; and
such was the benevolence of her disposition, that one almost thought time
respected a being so amiable, and laid his hand upon her so gradually,
that she reached the extremity of age, and the bowl was broken at the
cistern before she experienced either the decay of her organs or of her
excellent intellect. The recollection of her virtues and her talents is
now all that remains to us; but it will be a valued treasure to all who
shared her esteem."

Throughout these Keith papers there
are pleasant glimpses of a Scottish family of gentlefolks of the old
school. The men, all brave and persevering, are scattered over the world,
bettering the fortunes of their house, and raising the national character.
The women are gentle and domestic, with a strong sense both of humour and
pathos, with a certain Scottish liveliness, too, and those profuse and
friendly manners, said to have been derived from the long intercourse with
the French, of which I have had so much to say. Middle-aged people have
seen specimens of it in very old women. It was something which, though
totally different from the manners of the English gentry, had an unmistakable
character of high breeding. To the young ambassador it was a sad change to
pass from his own genial circle into the cold routine of diplomatic life
at so obdurately formalised a court as that of Denmark. He wailed loudly
from time to time about his lots after this fashion.

"The nonsense of etiquette has
already thrown a stumbling-block in my way, by a new and, I believe,
unprecedented regulation with respect to private audiences. But as
I have preserved all possible respect towards this court, and made my
report with fairness and temper to my own, I can be under no uneasiness
with regard to my share of the innovation and its consequences. A shut or
an open door—for that is the point—is a subject to be canvassed by the
higher pens. My duty is to wait for instructions, and adhere to them
quietly. In the mean time I heartily coasign that old harridan Etiquette,
with all her trumpery, to the lowest underling of all possible devils.
After looking round me with an anxious, yet a benevolent eye, for anything
that may be called a society, or even a single friend, male or female, I
am forced to own to myself that there is not any hope of succeeding. I do
not mean to asperse a whole nation, in which there are undoubtedly many
worthy people; but such is the shyness of all those I have seen to each
other, and still more to men of my cloth, that meeting them now and then
at dinner, or in a public place, forms not a more intimate connection than
that of three or four Dutchmen who have crossed in the same doit-boat at
Rotterdam....A Monsieur and Madame Juel are just come to town, with a
sweet little cherub of a daughter just fifteen; consequently just the very
thing that can be turned to no earthly advantage by a gentleman of my
years. These good people curtsied to me very politely at my presentation;
and as they are renowned for hospitality, I have since had the happiness
of seeing the outside of their street door, which is of strong handsome
oak, and painted yellow... Our week is now going to be parcelled out in
plays and operas, and there will be at least a place of rendezvous every
evening. Yet are we starched and demure even in our playhouses, for every
human being has his or her place allotted by the Book of Etiquette, and
sticks to it during the whole performance. Those who are two boxes from me
might as well be in Norway, for any manner of communication I can have
with them. My little Juel is within five seats of being as great a lady as
Madame de Blosset; and as I squat next to Madame L’Ambassadrice, I can, at
least twice in an evening see the tip of my cherub’s nose. Were she to
marry into the third class of grandees, I should see no more of her during
my stay in Denmark. It is really ridiculous to see how the world is
parcelled out here into no less than nine classes, six of whom I must
never encounter without horror. Yet my opera-glass tells me that numbers
eight and nine beat us all hollow as to flesh and blood."

Sir Robert’s next embassy was to
Vienna; and it will show that diplomacy had done little to conventionalise
his British feelings, to give a few sentences expressing his sensations on
hearing of the American revolutionary war. He writes from Vienna, on the
5th of February 1775: "I think next post will bring me a handsome sheet of
daylight into American matters, which to me are hitherto all mirk and
mystery. I am out of all patience with the six hundred congresses of as
many American villages, and I long to hear old Mother England hold to them
the language of affectionate authority and dignified firmness. I would not
hurt a hair of their crazy heath if I could help it; but I would enforce
the laws with temper and moderation, in order to impress upon their
memories this first salutary lessen of filial obedience.... The ferocious
miscreants who inhabit the outskirts of our colonies in America may be
guilty of all the crimes you ascribe to them, without their affecting my
opinions concerning the bulk of the community, and I’ll tell you why:
because when I buy a large piece of broadcloth, and convince myself by a
thorough examination that it is well spun, well woven, and warm and
durable through nine-tenths of the web, I don’t value it a pin the less
because it has been fretted and moth-eaten within two inches of the
selvage. I love mankind and our own homespun part of it from the bottom of
my heart; and it would be a pretty thing indeed if a fellow like me, who
has, his Suffolks, his Chamiers, his Drummonds, his Campbells, and his
Conways to boast of, should lay thorns upon his own pillow, because there
are thieves and pickpockets in the purlieus of St Gies."

Sir Robert Keith is one of the many
Scotsmen who saw Frederick the Great, and left notes of their impressions
of one whom it was so great a thing to have seen. Fritz might have
supposed that Scotsmen formed the greater portion of the inhabitants of
Britain, and that the predominating name among the Scots was Keith, or
Kite, as it was pronounced in Prussia. There were the two Roberts, the
father and son—the Earl Marischal of Scotland, and his own field-marshal.
There were two other Keith—brothers—intimately connected with the
adventures of Frederick’s early life. One of them appears with the title
of Lieutenant, the other of Page. They were the chief abettors of his
attempt to escape—or desert, as it was called in the Prussian official
documents—at Steinfurth, when travelling with his tyrant father in 1730.
These Kites had for their accomplice a Lieutenant Katt, who, until the
story came to be fully unravelled by Carlyle, was often confounded with
them. Katt was hanged with ignominy, but the two Keiths escaped. The page,
in fact, confessed the whole affair. The lieutenant, who was waiting at
Wesel to give assistance, was warned in time; and so one evening
Lieutenant Keith, "doubtless smelling something," saddled his horse, and
"decided to have a ride in the country this fine evening, and issued out
at the Brunnen Gate of Wesel. He is on the right bank of the Rhine;
pleasant yellow fields on this side and on that. He ambles slowly for a
space, then gradually awakens into speed—into full speed; arrives within a
couple of hours at Dingden, a village in the Munster territory, safe over
the Prussian border by the shortest line; and from Dingden rides at more
leisure, but without losing time, into the Dutch Overyssel region." He was
taken in hand by Chesterfield, the British Ambassador at the Hague, who
sent him to England. The old King had to content himself with symbolical
redress, and sentenced him "to be hanged in effigy, cut in four quarters,
and nailed to the gallows at Wesel."

As intimately as with any of the
Scotsmen in his own employment was Frederick connected with the British
Ambassador, Sir Alexander Mitchell, of the Mitchells of Thainston in
Aberdeenshire. Frederick talked speculative republicanism and speculative
virtue to him; and when the Scotsman seemed to show a dangerous
inclination for putting the speculative virtues into a practical shape, he
could say "I have no doubt of your good and honourable sentiments, my dear
Mr Mitchell. I could wish that everybody thought in the same manner: the
world would be all the happier for it, and men more virtuous."

In his now never-perused Epistle on
the Origin of Evil, he could speak of "mon cher Mitchell" as

He is said to have wept—whether
sincerely or not— as he saw Mitchell’s funeral procession pass. And he
might well have been sincere, for he was under many obligations to the
Scot. As we have seen some of his countrymen sent abroad to intimidate
aggressive powers, so Mitchell was sent to cheer and to help a struggling
cause with which Britain had more sympathy than it was expedient for her
rulers to show. He did his mission bravely and honourably. Whatever our
general view over the field of past history reveals to us about a policy
for the aggrandisement of one house, by squeezing out one small state
after another, the position in which the British people at that time saw
Frederick was the same that the gods love to look on—a brave man
struggling against fate in the shape of enemies stronger than himself. It
was as the representative of British sympathy with this that Mitchell went
over.

One who seems to have inherited the
ancient spirit of his countrymen, ever to give a good word in the go-by to
any respectable brother Scot casually met in the course of his inquiries,
gives this testimony to Mitchell : — "One wise thing the English have
done—sent an Excellency Mitchell, a man of loyalty, of sense, and honesty,
to be their resident at Berlin. This is the noteworthy, not yet much
noted, Sir Andrew Mitchell, by far the best Excellency England ever had in
that Court; an Aberdeen Scotsman, creditable to his country, hardheaded,
sagacious, sceptical of shows, but capable of recognising substances
withal, and of standing loyal to them stubbornly if needful; who grew to a
great mutual regard with Friedrich, and well-deserved to do so: constantly
about him during the next seven years, and whose letters are among the
perennially valuable documents in Friedrich’s history."

A life more at variance with the
placid luxurious ease of an embassy to some great court cannot well be
conceived. It was a mission, indeed, not to a court, but to a camp. In
critical times Mitchell was ever present. Whether when abandoned by the
world, and seemingly by Providence, Frederick sat in his old coat, in a
dirty hovel writing French poetry, or stood exulting over the wondrous
field of Rosbach..—Mitchell was at his side, not a cold diplomatist
watching and reporting, but a friend and champion, sharing his dangers and
helping to overcome them. He is even now and then actually under fire;
then he makes a narrow escape from capture, because, in his eagerness to
join his royal friend, he passes too near the enemy’s lines. At another
time he has to endure the hardships of a disastrous march, want of food
included. "The Prussian camp," he says, "is no place of pleasure. Neither
convenience nor luxury dwell here. You are well provided with everything,
if you bring it along with you. I find I must increase my equipage or
starve. All my family are like spectres....Pray let me know if my long
letter of the 21st was intelligible. It cost me much labour. I was twelve
hours on horseback in one day. I understand nothing by description. I must
see it, and therefore I fear what I write is not intelligible."

Where is the Secretary for Foreign
Affairs who has been accustomed to receive from his own ambassador such a
hint as the following, written on the 28th of August 1757, to Lord
Holderness, and explaining sufficiently the juncture to which it refers?

"England is cheated and ministers
duped by Hanover. What a pitiful figure will they make in Europe! The most
notorious breach of faith has been wantonly committed to support a weak,
ill-judged, and ineffectual measure. You know what has happened. ‘Why was
not the King of Prussia previously consulted? I can answer with my head he
would have yielded to any reasonable proposition for the safety of
Hanover. ‘What will posterity say of an Administration that made the
Treaty of Westminster for the safety of Hanover, and suffered the Hanover
ministers to say openly that they have no treaty with the King of Prussia,
nay, have suffered them to betray that prince who has risked his all to
save them, and whose misfortunes are owing to his generosity and good
faith? . . . . Let us have done with negotiating. After what has happened,
no man will trust us. I know not how to look the King of Prussia in the
face; and honour, my lord, is not to be purchased with money."

To one by whom he was backed in this
fashion, Frederick might well afford a little license of remonstrance and
sarcasm. Mitchell was celebrated for the broad, strong censures which he
often levelled against the King’s acts of cruelty and aggression, and
there is no doubt that Frederick stood in awe of his honest, observing
eye. He could be sarcastic and epigrammatic too, and one of his retorts
has been often repeated. Discussing the disaster of Port-Mahon, Mitchell
remarked, in a manner not congenial with the usual conversation of Sans
Souci, that Britain must place her trust in God. The King was not aware
that Britain had such an ally, "He is the only ally," said Mitchell, "who
requires no subsidies from us."

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